Surviving Savannah

by Patti Callahan Henry

I needed the evil to become good. I needed the dark to become light.

I wanted—no, I needed—the stories to make sense, for the world to be restored at the end.

“The secrets are lost to the waves. Only the sea knows, my child, and she keeps her secrets well.”

we’re made of stories, legends and myths just as we are made of water, atoms and flesh. Once you know it, you can’t un-know it; you can’t pretend that everything that happened before you were born doesn’t have something to do with who you are today.

no one, even if they believe they have, moves past the past. It follows; it shadows; it breathes quietly in the dark corners.

The idea that surviving brings everyone to a new and better place is a lie told by people who need the world to make sense.”

love, part obligation, mixed with the usual petty irritations and the bonds of an intimately shared history.

“Words like ‘know the ropes’; ‘slush fund’; ‘close quarters’; ‘batten down the hatches’; to be ‘in deep water’; ‘high and dry’—we use these phrases without realizing they come from our long and perilous connection with the sea. They came out of our need to conquer what can never be conquered, only respected and discovered.”

Tragedy—it can come from anywhere at any time. How do we go through life knowing that? How did we ever not know it? And yet we pretend we’re safe. It’s absurd.”

We are our truest selves when life and death walk hand in hand. When crisis comes, and tragedy explodes, our true character comes to the fore.

life always propels us toward living. Something in us wants to live, if we can tap into that part of our soul.”

her actions, her freedom, were inhibited by rules that made no sense, and by adults who couldn’t adequately explain them.

You’ll carry the loss with you, but in new ways.

You can’t dive to the bottom of the sea or look at the stars or hear a story like you just told me and not believe there is some hidden and unseen force we don’t understand.”

‘What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?’”

“You and I both know there’s a difference between prejudice and obliviousness but sometimes it can have the same result.”

Nothing all virtuous. Nothing all wicked. This mixture that is life, that is human, that is brokenness and wholeness.”